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Wing Commander III

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Re: Wing Commander III

#71

Post by daniel_rh »

skohan wrote: post #19
sandworm101 wrote: post #3

Owned it. It was campy fun even then but WCII and WC:Privateer were far and away the better games. III was one of many attempts at a game-movie crossover that never really worked imho. Privateer is the basis of EVE online, Star Citizen and countless other modern titles. In terms of influence it is up there with SimCity and Civilization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wing_Commander:_Privateer

I believe it was WCII which had a framerate which was dependent on the speed of the processor. I remember trying to play it some years after it came out, and you literally couldn't understand what was happening on screen because it was too fast.

It was WC1 and I disassembled the code and added in a time-dependent limiter in dosbox. I also added multiplayer--it's not quite documented and ready for consumption, but if you're interested in how it works, the code is right now up as a patch to dosbox in the wcmulti branch https://github.com/danielrh/dosbox3d/tree/wcmulti most of the changes are in the src/cpu/core_Normal.cpp and src/cpu/wc_net.cpp

Re: Wing Commander III

#72

Post by swivelmaster »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #46
afavour wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconding this. I think the game that most set my world alight as a kid was Star Control II. It was a wonderfully realised world of spaceships, alien races, battles and a sprawling story line. It blew my mind. But if I was presented with a game of similar magnitude today I'd have a pretty muted reaction. (I also probably wouldn't have time to play it!). I feel the same way about many things, like (to keep on the spac…

> But if I was presented with a game of similar magnitude today I'd have a pretty muted reaction Or maybe not. I'm yet to see any modern game that would even remotely approach the magnitude of SC2. So far, the closest competitor was the original Mass Effect game, itself clearly influenced by Star Control games, but even it failed to surpass it.

The problem here is that it is basically impossible for a modern game to achieve the magnitude of those old CRPGs if you just mean that in the sense of how big the universe is and how much story it contains, but with modern AAA standards. The man-hours required to create all that content would be ridiculous.

That being said, if you count the totality of the Mass Effect trilogy, including all its DLC, I think you do get the magnitude of one Star Control 2, and it's generally fantastic.

Re: Wing Commander III

#73

Post by daniel_rh »

plussed_reader wrote: post #30
skohan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it was WCII which had a framerate which was dependent on the speed of the processor. I remember trying to play it some years after it came out, and you literally couldn't understand what was happening on screen because it was too fast.

dosbox has a setting to lock the clock rate at a chosen rate for those older games that are timing dependent like that.

the clock rate isn't quite enough--because more enemies do cause it to advance the program counter more... really you do want to measure how long the frame took and sleep the interim

Re: Wing Commander III

#74

Post by galangalalgol »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #46
afavour wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconding this. I think the game that most set my world alight as a kid was Star Control II. It was a wonderfully realised world of spaceships, alien races, battles and a sprawling story line. It blew my mind. But if I was presented with a game of similar magnitude today I'd have a pretty muted reaction. (I also probably wouldn't have time to play it!). I feel the same way about many things, like (to keep on the spac…

> But if I was presented with a game of similar magnitude today I'd have a pretty muted reaction Or maybe not. I'm yet to see any modern game that would even remotely approach the magnitude of SC2. So far, the closest competitor was the original Mass Effect game, itself clearly influenced by Star Control games, but even it failed to surpass it.

Last I checked I had spent around 700hrs in skyrim...

Re: Wing Commander III

#75

Post by aidenn0 »

Firehawke wrote: post #62
aidenn0 wrote: post #53

The author points here (and I think in older posts) to the change of setting for the reason that Strike Commander failed. That's definitely part of it, but the game was essentially unplayable without QEMM386 (a commercial expanded-memory manager of the time). With the MS EMM386, you would regularly get crashes to the dos prompt (I think the typical error included a .OVL file in the output). Prior to the knowledge of…

It's amusing in a dark and cynical way that this was the second time they'd managed to screw up in regards to EMS/XMS. JEMM, integrated into Ultima 7, made that particular title hellish to get working. You needed to find a mouse driver that was small enough to fit in conventional memory because JEMM wouldn't work with EMM386.SYS or QEMM386.SYS loaded and would not let you play if either were loaded or you didn't have…

JEMM was used by Origin in pretty much all the games of that era, including Strike Commander, Privateer and WC Armada.

However, as it goes with anything game related, there wasn't a single version of JEMM (just like there wasn't a single version of e.g. Sierra's SCI runtime), so they all had different features and quirks. I believe they mostly shared the same VCPI interface though, as MyJEMM[1] was reported to work with most of those games despite being developed specifically for Privateer.

1: https://www.wcnews.com/wcpedia/MyJEMM

Re: Wing Commander III

#76

Post by standardUser »

A legendary gaming experience. Not just the cinematics, but the story and gameplay were as good as it got in that era.

It doesn't get too much attention in this story, but it sounds like this was a rare occurrence where EA actually improved a beloved gaming franchise! As opposed to burying it in a shallow grave and urinating on its still-warm corpse, as is their tactic with most franchise acquisitions in recent years.

Re: Wing Commander III

#77

Post by daniel_rh »

daniel_rh wrote: post #71
skohan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it was WCII which had a framerate which was dependent on the speed of the processor. I remember trying to play it some years after it came out, and you literally couldn't understand what was happening on screen because it was too fast.

It was WC1 and I disassembled the code and added in a time-dependent limiter in dosbox. I also added multiplayer--it's not quite documented and ready for consumption, but if you're interested in how it works, the code is right now up as a patch to dosbox in the wcmulti branch https://github.com/danielrh/dosbox3d/tree/wcmulti most of the changes are in the src/cpu/core_Normal.cpp and src/cpu/wc_net.cpp

the way you run it is... run a retail copy of WC.EXE with the branch of dosbox3d then do wcnet startserver on one machine and wcnet connect then both machines just run wing commander as normal. and the first one can start the first mission and the other connects in and gets to play as spirit. You can play through the whole campaign this way

Re: Wing Commander III

#79

Post by mikepurvis »

mrexroad wrote: post #52
afavour wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconding this. I think the game that most set my world alight as a kid was Star Control II. It was a wonderfully realised world of spaceships, alien races, battles and a sprawling story line. It blew my mind. But if I was presented with a game of similar magnitude today I'd have a pretty muted reaction. (I also probably wouldn't have time to play it!). I feel the same way about many things, like (to keep on the spac…

I dunno... The Mandalorian has achieved everything that the prequels and episodes 7-9 were unable to; it did exactly the things folks said were impossible. While I've been a fan of Discovery for the most part, and it occasionally shows glimpses of promise, it's largely not "Star Trek." The story telling is simply just not rooted same soul that Trek has been built upon. I'm okay with change, but not so much with creat…

I know it's been discussed to death, but just wanted to say I was late to the Mandalorian and I completely agree with you— it felt very true to the Star Wars universe, while at the same time expanding it considerably and not relying on cheap recycling of past characters and plot arcs.

And all of this on the kind of technology platform which could easily have enabled the absolute worst of the Lucas instincts to thrive as far as overcomplicated plots and gee-whiz special effects. Somehow it managed to take us to a dozen different planets and yet stay firmly rooted in a story about parenthood— and that, between a faceless warrior and a voiceless puppet. Wild!

Re: Wing Commander III

#80

Post by htek »

cgriswald wrote: post #6

I've lost something. When I was a kid, buying a new game was nearly impossible; If I was lucky, I'd get one for a birthday present or a Christmas gift. Occasionally a cool friend would lend me a copy of something. For a very short time, I lived about a mile away from a video game rental store and I'd sometimes be able to convince an adult I was responsible enough to return the game and spend my own money renting a ga…

Mmm, achievements don't really seem as special anymore for a variety of reasons. Everything is so regimented in games now. You get an achievement for completing the tutorial mission. You get an achievement for finding the thing you can't progress in the game without it in your possession. You get an achievement for collecting 1000 blivets from radio towers. It's all uninteresting, uninspired busywork or crap put into the game because it's expected.

There's also accumulated gaming experience. I've been gaming for more than 4 decades, there ain't nothing new under the sun.

Also, real life cheevos are harder, and some would say more important, to attain.

I'd say for me, the magic of a lot of things wore off a long time ago. YMMV. GL HF

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